Chapter 43 A Dying Town
WES watched Grant Holloway stand up in the middle of the Legion hall and turn a room against a burned old man.
The town had called the meeting itself. That’s the part Holloway didn’t even have to engineer.
George Ostrander’s fire had scared people — a fire near you scares you into wanting somebody to blame and somebody to fix it — and the Legion hall filled up on a Tuesday night with two hundred anxious neighbors and a folding table of coffee and a lot of noise about who was doing this and why the county wasn’t stopping it.
Pike and I sat in the back with our task-force faces on.
Birdie sat three rows up next to Earl, doing a subtle, expert version of small and scared, and I made myself not watch her do it, because I’d started to find the performance unbearable now that I knew the woman under it.
I’d done my homework on Grant Holloway by then, the way I do homework, which is slow and dull and thorough.
I’d read the glass works into the ground, the last decade of it, the layoffs and the delayed pensions and the fire sale of the machinery to a firm in Tennessee.
I’d found the elder Holloway’s obituary, which ran long, as obituaries run long for men who were once the biggest thing in a small place, and I’d found the part near the end where it said he died at home eight months after the plant closed, and I’d sat with that, because I know what a man dies of eight months after the thing he built dies, and it isn’t in the obituary.
I’d read Grant’s loan filings on Harbor Landing, three rounds of them, each one more leveraged than the last, a man betting the next dollar to cover the last one, the arithmetic of a person who cannot stop because stopping means admitting the first bet was wrong.
None of it excused him. All of it explained him.
That’s the hard part of my job that nobody warns you about: the more thoroughly you understand a man, the harder it gets to hate him cleanly, and the case doesn’t care whether you can hate him cleanly.
Holloway didn’t push to the front. He let himself be called there, which is a different and better trick.
Somebody said, “Grant, you know this town better than anybody, what do we do,” and he came up to the folding table slow, hands in his pockets, a big soft-spoken man in a good jacket he’d owned a while, and he waited for the room to quiet, and it did.
“I grew up two streets from George,” Holloway said.
“My dad ran the glass works. Some of you worked for him. When it closed, I watched this town’s heart go out the door in a U-Haul, family by family, and I promised myself I would spend whatever I had to bring it back.
” He let that sit. “So I’ll tell you what I think.
I think we’ve got a hard-luck town and somebody preying on it, and I think the answer is not to be scared into our houses.
The answer is to be worth investing in again.
I’ve got a plan for the riverfront that would put four hundred people to work.
I’ve been trying to make it happen for three years against every kind of no.
And I’ll tell you honest—” the honest landed like a coin in a well “—it kills me that while I’m trying to build George a future, somebody’s out there burning his present.
If selling me that corner lot would’ve kept that man out of a hospital bed, then shame on all of us for making him feel like holding on was the brave thing. ”
It was masterful, and I sat in the back and hated how much of it was true.
That was the thing I’d been slow to learn about Grant Holloway, the thing Birdie had warned me about with her map: he was not a man telling lies.
He was a man who had told himself one enormous thing so many times that everything downstream of it came out sincere.
He really did love the town. His father really had died watching it hollow out.
He really did believe Harbor Landing would save it, and that the fires were a tragedy happening to his plan rather than the engine of it, and I would have bet my badge that if you’d asked him under oath whether he’d hired a man to set them, he’d have gone pale and said no with his chest and half believed it, because the checks went to an LLC that paid a contractor for “site remediation,” and a man can hide behind a phrase like site remediation for a long time before he lets himself hear what he’s paying for.